Sunday, June 5, 2016

To be honest I can’t quite remember the
exact reason how this started. The real origin of the seed of the idea could
have come from anywhere, perhaps just the need to have a basic concept to tie a
mix together. Why Japanese in particular I cannot really say anymore. I don’t remember
if there was a particular album or anything that triggered it off. But in any
case, I remember discussing it with my good friend, fellow music lover and
radio presenter Josh/DJ Tropical Breeze while in Melbourne at Christmas time. The idea from that time was that we would
each prepare a mix of Japanese ambient music and publish them around the same
time. Since then it has been a steady immersion in as much Japanese ambient,
synth pop and experimental music as possible, around 6 months of focussed
listening. While we did exchange names of artists and albums, there was no
other insight into what the other was doing until we shared our mixes and track
lists this week. Several of the artists consequently overlap, although in the
end there is only one track that is the same between mixes, Hidekazu Imashige/Gallery
Six’s Hakasui [Shimmering Moods].

My shortlist for the mix was 100 tracks
clocking in at around 12 hours of sound if unedited and unmixed, so about one
third of the tracks made the final cut and plenty more that didn’t make it.
Consequently there is also quite a bit of overlap between tracks, with the
first 17 tracks all fitting in to the first 25 minutes alone. That is, for the
first 25 minutes there is generally at least two and sometimes up to four
tracks playing at the same time. It’s a bit less crowded by the end.

One thing that surprised me making the mix,
which was assembled carefully on Adobe Audition and in no way was mixed live,
was that the tendency was to mix down tracks and not up as is usually the case.
Not sure if this is something specific to Japanese ambient or it relates more
to the superimposition of multiple tracks at the same time. In any case, the
mix uses a lot of dynamic range and tries to emphasise the noise and the
silence where possible.

I have seen quite a few Japanese artists
complaining about lazy Western journalists describing their music in terms of
Zen and related concepts, probably without really understanding anything about
Zen and having only a post-card image of what Japan is really like. In any
case, I really appreciate a lot of the material I found was based on field
recordings and even in some cases people playing instruments as if joining in
with nature and natural sounds as well as of course some temple sounds and
related audio phenomenon. It would be interesting to talk directly to a lot of
the artists and to see what terms they would use to describe their sounds and
if Zen is a genuine interest or it is just a coincidence.